Mechanical Humanity, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Android: the Posthuman Subject in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Artificial Intelligence: A.I. Scott Loren In the mid-1990s, Stanley Kubrick contacted Steven Spielberg with an idea for a project he had been working on for several years. The script was based on Brian Aldiss's short story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long," which Kubrick bought the rights to in 1983, three years after the release of The Shining, and 15 years after the release of the film it was thematically much closer to: 2001: A Space Odyssey, based on Arthur C. Clarke's “The Sentinel.” "Supertoys" is a story about artificial intelligence and, as in 2001, about how artificially intelligent machines and humans interact. There were various impediments, though, that kept Kubrick from making this film. For one, the story revolves around an artificial boy, and British law made it prohibitive to work for the prolonged periods of time with a child actor that Kubrick would have required. And he was not willing to make the film elsewhere. After failed attempts to construct a robot that would satisfactorily take the place of the child actor, and although Kubrick had invested years of work in the project, for which he already had a script and hundreds of storyboards, he offered it to Spielberg, and proposed that he produce it while Spielberg directed it. According to Spielberg and longtime Kubrick producer Jan Harlan, Kubrick offered Spielberg the project as opposed to shelving it because he felt that Spielberg had the right sensibilities for this story. Spielberg was hesitant, though, and it wasn't until after Kubrick's death, when his wife, Christiane, contacted Spielberg and renewed the offer, that Spielberg took over A.I. and made it his own. As Harlan has suggested in interviews, A.I. is clearly a Spielberg film, and would have been much darker had Kubrick filmed it. Still, we can see traces of Kubrick at work in A.I. A.I. recalls 2001 in various ways: in both films, the plot revolves around an artificially intelligent entity and the question of the role this entity plays within the human community. There are also various overlappings between the cyborgian boy David1 (Haley Joel Osment) and the super-computer HAL (voice, Douglas Rain) in terms of what they in fact are: machines created for social use/benefit, that are highly intelligent, 1 which develop personalities and human attachments, and so forth. Inevitably, there are also overlappings in terms of what they represent: a fear of technology insofar as it threatens the distinction between the human and the non-human. Of interest to our overall discussion will be to note the structural and thematic similarities between these films, but also to note where A.I. departs and clearly becomes a Spielberg project. From the outset, we can identify departure in the philosophical tradition the respective projects are rooted in: 2001 is framed within the tradition of Darwinian evolution and survival of the fittest, where A.I. is framed within the tradition of the Freudian Oedipus Complex. Both, however, are firmly rooted in the more contemporary philosophical framework of the postmodern and the posthuman. They each raise questions of authenticity and subjectivity by juxtaposing the human and the machine. Accompanying these uncanny juxtaposings, and in order to problematize certain notions about subjectivity, there is an elaboration on the human qualities and characteristics of the artificial beings. Both films depict human communities within which AIs - artificially intelligent machines or, in this case, human-like non-humans - have already been integrated to a certain degree. The boarders between the human and the non-human are conspicuously ambiguous or even fluid, and in this regard, these are posthuman narratives. HAL's possession of survival instincts and David's Oedipal love for his mother place both narratives in philosophical traditions that attempt to define what, precisely, the human animal consists in. Recognizing that the films share this element, we might ask what the effect of thus portraying the artificial is. As we will see, both films portray the artificial entity as a 'subject', in the psychoanalytical or Lacanian sense, and in so doing, they comment on the status of postmodern/posthuman subjectivity, on contemporary notions of subject formation, and on anxieties associated with them. Within these communities, what we witness is the introduction of an AI to a human community, followed by a crisis that is staged in order to give utterance to particular anxieties about humanist notions of autonomy, free will and individuality - anxieties about the very borders between the human and the non-human. 2 2001: A Human Oddity, Posthuman Normality In considering the relationship between humans and non-humans within these fictive communities, the first question we want to ask has to do with intent and practice: What are the machines intended for, and how are they, in fact, used? In 2001, HAL's purpose and his practical application are very utilitarian in nature. He was built as a highly advanced tool. This focus on the tool and its relationship to human 'advancement' is signaled at the beginning of the film, when we witness what we assume to be a moment critical to the evolutionary development of Homo sapiens. A Neanderthal-like ape-man discovers that it can use a bone to defeat opposing tribes and to kill animals for food, and thus advance along the evolutionary scale within Darwin’s logic of the survival of the fittest. The bone as a tool is then equated to the satellite we will see in the following sequence: when the ape-man throws the bone up into the air, we witness it spiraling against the sky, and then there is a jump cut to a satellite platform with a similar form floating through space. What is signaled here is an advance in technology that accompanies an advance in human evolution. This 'advance', though, is ambiguous, as both images are of tools potentially used for killing (the satellite we see here is intended for carrying nuclear warheads2). Also ambiguous is the lack of a subtitle separating "The Dawn of Man" from ‘modern’ man at the initial cut to the satellite (as we know, subsequent shifts in time are indicated throughout the film). Regarding HAL’s function, we soon find out that he is used for overseeing and attending to the details of a mission to Jupiter. In an earth to spacecraft interview by BBC news, the interviewer (Martin Amor) notes: HAL, you have an enormous responsibility on the mission, in many ways perhaps the greatest responsibility of any single mission element. You are the brain and central nervous system of the ship. And your responsibilities include watching over the men in hibernation. From this and other comments, we later come to find out that not only is HAL in command of the entire journey, he is also the only ‘crew member’ that knows what the purpose of the mission in fact is. The tone of HAL's 'humanness' is already set here by attributing to him anthropomorphic features (“the brain and central nervous system”) and is further suggestive of HAL’s human-like relation to the other crew-members. HAL is 3 clearly an active part of this team. The humans themselves are, by contrast, framed as being 'just along for the ride', so to speak. The majority of them are in hibernation for the voyage while HAL navigates the ship. The two crewmembers who are awake, Dr. Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Dr. Poole (Gary Lockwood), are seen eating, jogging, playing chess, drawing, sun-bathing (in a sun bed), and giving interviews. What we do not see them doing is working. This is thrown into even starker contrast when we find out that they don’t know what the purpose of the mission is. It is as if the ‘human resources’ on board are precisely that: resources or tools waiting to be put to use. Thus, we might say that HAL is a working machine. He does everything from enabling humans to travel to places they would never reach without such magnificent tools, to keeping a crew psychology report. It’s also worth noting that, beyond attending to mission responsibilities, HAL also engages in recreational activities with the crewmembers. In this sense, his place in this community may be of a utilitarian nature, but he interacts with the other members as an equal (or even a superior), rather than as a tool. In A.I. we might say that David, on the other hand, is really a luxury item. He is intended to replace a lacking 'real' child. As the narrator in the prologue (voice, Ben Kingsley) informs us, "when most governments in the developed world introduced legal sanctions to strictly license pregnancies…robots, who are never hungry and who did not consume resources beyond those of their first manufacture, were so essential an economic link in the chain mail of society." And as we find out in the beginning of the film, Professor Hobby's (William Hurt) intention is to create an artificially intelligent machine that can love. When we later find out that David is modeled after Hobby's own deceased child, the impulse behind David's creation becomes all too obvious. David is born out of loss and mourning. He is born out of emotional need, and this is precisely the capacity in which he functions in his new home. One of Professor Hobby’s employees, whose son has been in a comma for a prolonged period of time, is given the opportunity to take David home as an artificial adoptive son.